Using a CDN to Support Changes in IoT Technology

Decades ago, you could assume that a user connecting to your site had either a desktop computer or a laptop. Now, numerous desktop, mobile and IoT devices could be connecting to your application. Each one of them have their own resources, screen resolution, and UI methods. It’s almost impossible to foresee the number of devices that could potentially use your site in the future, but there is one thing that you can always depend on — a CDN will support speed and performance even when users have a slower connection.

Speed and Mobile Devices

Since Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, mobile device use has skyrocketed. Users no longer prefer a laptop to browse the web. Instead, they prefer a smartphone or tablet. Many gadget geeks have the latest iPhone or Android the minute it’s released to the public, but plenty of others stick with older devices. These older devices don’t have the bandwidth and resources to support large amounts of data.

Mobile device connections in rural areas exacerbate the slowness issue, and then a user halfway across the globe will load application pages slower than any other city location. With a CDN, you offer a performance boost when the user is able to connect to a closer server and get content delivered much faster than a traditional origin server.

Even a web farm can’t offer the speeds of a CDN. You can have several servers behind a load balancer, but the user is still forced to connect to a server halfway across the globe. With a CDN, users with slower connection see a performance increase when they are able to connect to the closest CDN edge server based on their current geographic location.

Supporting IoT Speed

Internet-ready devices aren’t a new trend, but technology continues to evolve and improve IoT’s ability to communicate with the cloud. IoT has had some growing pains — security has been a source of many issues pertaining to IoT. These devices are also not made to support high bandwidth or large data transfers. Depending on the IoT device, communication with the Internet is necessary for functionality.

Developers create APIs to work with IoT devices, so they need a host that offers speed, reliability and scalability as more users connect their devices and rely on uptime. A CDN pulls data from the origin server and hosts it in cache. Should any one server fail, failover servers are available to support traffic.

What makes supporting these devices is the unknown. What’s current today won’t be current tomorrow. These devices might only transfer small amounts of data at the current date, but it’s possible that video and images could be integrated into these devices functionality.

With a CDN, the developer does not need to worry about speed and performance on the API server. The CDN scales along with the increase in user base, so the developers just need to focus on the stability of their code and deploying updates. They no longer worry about the numerous devices and the ability to render data quickly. The bottleneck is no longer the developer’s API but the ability of the device to work with the application’s data.

With IoT, the future is unknown but what is known is that these devices can perform regardless of where the future takes them based on the speed and reliability of a CDN. Developers can no longer rely on infrastructure at one location but rather build a system that uses several data centers across the globe.

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